


all the strength we need in the shape of us

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M, Pre-Series, Sleepy Cuddles, a very brief hamster cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:25:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8877679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: Yuuri thinks, moving to lie down beside him, that Phichit sleeps like violets smell.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goukyorin (sashimisusie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/gifts).



> Yet another love letter to Phichit Chulanont via Katsuki Yuuri. Whether or not I will eventually emerge from precanon Phichuuri hell remains to be seen.
> 
> Early Christmas gift to Susie, who boards all my ships with me, however small and rickety, and however wild the sea before us.
> 
> Title from Ian Britt's ["The Shape of Us."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q49eyWkrac8)

Sunday morning, and it’s raining out in the city.

Everything in their world, Yuuri finds, slows down in the rain. Which means it’s no surprise when Yuuri comes home from the post office to find Phichit still asleep, sprawled out on his stomach with his arms looped loosely around the pillow. It’s nearly the exact image Yuuri had said _see you later_ to just a couple of hours ago, bending down close to the mattress, the words a breath against the shell of his ear—except that in the seemingly insignificant pocket of time he’s been away the blanket has shapeshifted, moved from being spread out across Phichit’s body to tangle and weave between his legs.

Phichit awake is like a lightning bolt in the flesh; on any other day he wakes with the sun, and stops for nothing. He rises earlier than Yuuri and usually sleeps later than him if Yuuri doesn’t take it upon himself to physically herd him into bed. Yuuri doesn’t think himself undisciplined, unless it’s one of his bad days, but watching Phichit always leaves him baffled, unable to imagine what it must be like to move through the world with so much energy.

It’s the reason Sunday mornings are precious. They give Phichit back to him in ways no one else knows about, show him to Yuuri at angles he knows no one else would believe if he ever spoke about it.

Slowly, with feather-steps, Yuuri picks his way across the floor to come in close, noticing as if for the first time how much life they’ve accumulated in their little apartment—their three hamsters also asleep in their big cage in the corner, the potted violets on the windowsill. He remembers the hamsters had come home with them a couple of months ago, the violets just last month as a gift from the old lady at the flower shop downstairs, each seemingly random impulse-acquisition its own testament to Phichit’s unique ways of housebreaking, his all-abiding desire to care for things and help them come alive.

Sometimes Phichit will lift the pot from the sill, bring the flowers close to Yuuri’s face and tell him to sniff, and his head fills with a green scent—delicate and sweet, fresh as rainfall on a garden. Now Yuuri thinks, moving to lie down beside him, that Phichit sleeps like violets smell. That’s the only way he can think to describe it, watching with a half-smile and one arm folded beneath his head. Yuuri takes in his eyelashes, the way his lips part as he breathes softly in and out. The deep dip of his back across the mattress and the band of warm skin at his waist where his shirt’s ridden up. All these things are still sights his heart skips at, even if by now he has them all on the back of his hand.

Phichit awake is a presence that fills up a whole room with ease; most days Yuuri forgets how small he is, how fragile he can look when at rest. It’s only seeing him like this that makes him remember. And, remembering, all Yuuri wants to do next is touch him—if only for assurance, if only for proof that he too can care for things, even if only for Phichit, even if only for as long as Phichit wants him here.

That Phichit wants him at all is something Yuuri still needs to touch him to believe. So he reaches out across the gap—a gap they’ve already worked to make narrow, no more than the crack between two mattresses pushed right up against each other—and dances his fingertips across Phichit's forehead, pushing the hair back from his face. And just as Yuuri had expected, the contact has him stirring, a long, slow smile already dawning as he opens one hazy eye.

“See anything you like?”

Only Phichit could have the presence of mind to make a pass right on the heels of being woken up, where lesser humans would struggle to even articulate a full sentence. Yuuri chuckles, ruffling his hair. “I liked you better when you were quiet.”

“That’s not true,” Phichit tells him. Even his voice sounds like the rain outside, low and airy, sleep-thick, not quite the him the rest of the world knows. Even his hands as they move to bat at Yuuri’s are languid, circling, as if to say they can go slow, take their time. “You like me all the time.”

“Stop it, you.” Yuuri’s arms open; without pause Phichit curls into him, head settling beneath his chin and fingers grasping at the back of his shirt, closing the gap. “Come here. You already know.”

Instead of the blanket it’s Yuuri’s knees between his legs now, Yuuri’s hands slipping beneath the hem of his shirt to rest at the small of his back. Yuuri closes his eyes and thinks about his skin—about tracing the arc of Phichit’s spine with mouth and fingertips, bone for bone, and hearing him laugh and laugh and laugh. Only Phichit could laugh so much without stopping to breathe. Only Phichit loves like this, in small spaces and short distances.

He hears Phichit laughing now, lips to Yuuri’s collarbone so that the vibrations of it run all through him, and Yuuri needs to tighten his arms, hold him as close as it’s possible to hold someone. Phichit must feel it, here—how his head on Yuuri’s heart has made it pulse and quicken, keeping time to the sound of the rain. When they breathe together, there are the violets, the air itself alive with them.

“I guess I do,” he says. The line his smile makes across the skin of Yuuri’s throat is a path that needs no maps.


End file.
